Tag Archives: Da Vinci

Can a toe provide the answer to Mona Lisa mystery?

Posted on by
4

Excavations at Sant'Orsola.

Experts digging around a former convent in Florence have unearthed a big toe that might belong to Lisa Gherardini, the subject of Leonardo Da Vinci’s famed Mona Lisa painting.

Little is known about the real life of the noblewoman said to have posed for Da Vinci, but she is thought to have died in the 1540s in Florence’s Sant’Orsola convent.

Last month, experts started digging around Sant’Orsola in hopes of finding the remains of Gherardini.

Working on the project are two of Italy’s famed art super sleuths, Francesco Mallegni, the anthropologist/detective who famously brought to light Dante’s Cannibal Count and Silvano Vinceti.

So far, in the first tomb excavated under an altar, the only significant remains are a bone fragment, probably of the big toe of a left foot. Mallegni told daily La Nazione that it might belong to a woman and provide enough DNA material to identify Gherardini.

Research will continue with ground-penetrating radar in the central part of the church where they believe there may be other crypts.

The large Sant’Orsola complex dates to 1309, ceased its life as a convent in the 1800s, then became a tobacco factory before being used by the university up to the 1950s. It stood semi-derelict with its windows bricked-up until restoration work started in 2010.

Art sleuths hunt for Mona Lisa’s bones

Posted on by
1

Hoping to solve the mystery behind Leonardo Da Vinci’s masterpiece Mona Lisa, scientists in Florence are looking for the bones of his presumed model,  Lisa Gherardini.

Working on the project are two of Italy’s famed art super sleuths, Francesco Mallegni, the anthropologist/detective who famously brought to light Dante’s Cannibal Count and Silvano Vinceti who found painter Caravaggio’s remains.

Little is known about the real life of the noblewoman said to have posed for Da Vinci, but she is thought to have died in the 1540s in Florence’s Sant’Orsola convent.

The large Sant’Orsola complex dates to 1309, ceased its life as a convent in the 1800s, then became a tobacco factory before being used by the university up to the 1950s. It stood semi-derelict with its windows bricked-up until restoration work started in 2010.

“Using ground-penetrating radar we have already identified a crypt under one of two churches in the convent, the search will start from this spot,” Vinceti told daily La Nazione. “Given the architecture of the building and manuscripts of the nuns who lived there, we believe that the crypt was used to guard the tombs.”

Researchers hope to finally solve the ongoing mystery about the model with the mysterious smile: over the years, historians have theorized that the woman was in fact a self-portrait of the painter or perhaps a young boy.

How could they prove it?

“If we find anything, the DNA of Lisa Gherardini would then be compared with DNA from two her two children, Bartolomeo and Piero Del Giocondo who are buried in Santissima Annunziata,” Mallegni said. “Only then could we go back to her facial structure and compare it to the painting.”

Researchers Find Symbols in Mona Lisa’s Eyes: Mystery or Hoax?

Posted on by
Reply

Can you make out the “L” and “S” in her irises?


I’ve been following the story of Italian research team delving deep into Leonardo Da Vinci’s “Mona Lisa.”

La Gioconda, as the painting is called in Italian, has always been a mystery. Still, I’m not so sure this find really sheds any new light on the 500-year-old masterpiece.

Silvano Vinceti and team claim to have spied the letters “L” and “S” in her eyes and the symbolic number “72” in the background.

Don’t get me wrong: I love using tech to pore over old paintings, whether its Leonardo’s “Last Supper“or Caravaggio’s “Bacchus.” (One editor, assigning yet another story on Leonardo, joked I was on the “Dan Brown beat.”)

When you look at something a few hundred years old with a level a detail previously unavailable, something interesting always turns up.

In this case, though, Vinceti and his team are working off high-definition scanned images from a company called Lumiere Technology in Paris, which specializes in digitizing artworks, and then processed by a lab in Rome.

The lack of transparency (pun intended) about the processing is what makes me skeptical.

When his colleague Stefania Romano sent me the press packet with the image, I couldn’t make anything out. Before writing back to her asking if they had another image, I looked at their website. In the image you see above,  the letters in her mysterious eyes are much clearer – making me wonder which one is the correct shot and whether they’ve been manipulated or not.

Vinceti told AP that a Roman lab “digitally excluded reflexes and other colors in the eyes in order to isolate the letters and make them stand out.”

The Leonardo experts they interviewed were also skeptical about this latest discovery.

If they’d only put the hi-res image online even temporarily – like art digitizer Hal9000 has done – or made a video of the stripping process, we could all see whether there’s really something behind those enigmatic eyes.